Lessons from Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger: UCONN Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at 50

by Audre Lorde, Jane Anna Gordon (contributor), Briona Simone Jones

55 pages, Paperback

Published February 21, 2024

About the author

Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone."

Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addressed themes of love, betrayal, childbirth and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem "Martha", in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: "[W]e shall love each other here if ever at all." Later books continued her political aims in lesbian and gay rights, and feminism. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of colour. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.

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Reviews

[LaQuetta Glaze · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lessons from Audre Lorde’s The Use of Anger reads like a conversation, which makes the book a strong resource for women’s studies. Women are often taught to push down their anger and as a result, opportunities to focus that energy productively, strategically, and powerfully are often lost. A resonating quote: “For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, while we wait in SILENCE for that final luxury of fearlessness, the WEIGHT of that silence will choke us. This book is an important discussion as we embrace anger with strategy and understanding. Excellent read. Highly recommended.